Well Hello There Fellow Technicians And Hivers
The struggle is real and it's even more real when you have to do work on a "Plaas Bakkie" (What we call a farm pickup truck) now more than often these things work HARD AS HELL and they are slogged through mud and cow dung! This means doing work on.. not the most pleasant of things to do! Everything is muddy and struggles to come loose, things break simply when you touch them AHHH it's a gigantic mess but that is why we are here isn't it?
We got this farm truck and it was only suppose to be a quick clutch replacement, actually just needed to check what is the problem around the clutch because they fitted a new clutch and something is not right, turns out the farmer has a worker on the farm who works on the vehicles... Well the wrong clutch was fitted and this worker decided to make some modifications of his own.
Laughs he should have just spoken up and say I screwed up Bossman.
The Slippy Clutch
Well we got a new clutch, fitted it and I noticed something very wrong. Actually I removed the transmission again because I thought I might have made a bugger up with the clutch (Would be ironic ey) Turns out because the wrong clutch was fitted and the travel distance on the slave cylinder was different the worker then extended the slave cylinder they had. This meant that when the right clutch was fitted it was ALOT longer than it had to be.
See this guy should have spoken up, these clutches are insane expensive I think they are almost $700 USD if not more.
Here you can see the piece he welded on, at-least he went the extra mile and cleaned the weldings off a little bit. What a trooper. Unfortunately this didn't help one bit!
Never the less I congratulate him for trying at the very least.
Needless to say and as most could have seen from the first picture that I have indeed found an unmodified piston and a rubber boot that was in a much better state than the one on the truck.
Keep in mind that all of this being done here is to help out the client, he is not paying for any of this. Sometimes I think we help too much because small problems like these tend to take up the most time.
The Sloppy Braking
The client also asked us to check why the truck didn't have proper handbrake, well as always the leading cause is mud and dirt. As I said these things tend to get dragged through mud on a daily!
Everything was so clogged up with sand it was a nightmare! The brake adjusters was all but rusted up from years of never being cleaned!
I know I know, most people don't really know what they are looking at and I don't mean this in a bad way BUT what you're looking at is irrelevant, what is relevant is the amount of rust and dirt.
These parts were all shiny at some point in life, yet now they look the colour of mud. They have been through a lot and I am surprised that they held up for so long and even more surprised at the fact that it still had all it's retainers and springs in place.
That's rare, very rare.
Well if I'm not mistaken the customer did pay for these parts on the brakes so at-least this part of the job wasn't a freebie.
It was more annoying having to release the load on the adjuster to get the braking drum off than anything else.
We fitted the brand new parts, gave it some proper lubrication and re-adjusted the brakes and they ended up being perfect! Imagine the face on the customer when he gets in the car to pull the handbrake and it only gives three clicks instead of pulling it through the roof.
The Speedometer
Last but not least the speedometer on the pickup wasn't working and it turned out to be a loose wire.. well all of the wires were broken straight off. This wasn't a major fix at all.
Now one might argue that you need to replace the sensor, yeah yeah yeah. Why though? For a loose wire? The customer would never pay for a new one only if a wire was cut.
Anyways, this is after all not a first world country so meh.
I removed the sensor and turned over to the workbench, made for a much easier job than struggling underneath the vehicle like a lunatic and most likely lose my mind in the process! Laughs!
See? a simple fix, what I did to make my job a little easier was I added soldering wire on both ends before joining them together, the joining process is just a lot easier that way.
The other trick was cleaning out some of the plastic casing off the sensor, the wires were broken off against the plastic so if I decided not to clean it up they would never have held up, one bump in the road and they'll tear right off!
And she is sealed up nicely! I sealed off each wire separately and then I sealed them off together and heated the isolation tape up a little bit for it to shrink in nicely. I took extra measures to seal it up since the wiring sleeve is already damaged and this is a farm truck and it would most likely be slopped through mud again.
Just go the extra mile, would it really hurt that much.
Well that concludes what needed done, the clutch fixed, the brakes fixed and most of all the owner can now see whether he is speeding or slagging in traffic. 🙃 😉
Dated 13/04/2023
Take note this is not a how to guide, merely myself talking about the work I do and my thoughts around certain things.
To everyone who made it this far into my post Thank you for the read and the support.
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Most of all please leave a input in the comments below, whether is good or bad critic I would like to know, whether its your opinion or your way of doing things in a different manner I would like.
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